The multiview video is a new type of multimedia technology that provides a sense of realism and a sense of immersion using multiple view channels. The multiview application is the most general and challenging application model which may be used when expressing, storing, and transmitting three-dimensional (3D) information. The aim of the multiview application is to provide a virtual reality by giving interactivity with media to a user. This technology is expected to be widely applied to 3D movies, realistic broadcasting, entertainment, medical practice, education, sightseeing, culture, remote sensing, and information recording of national treasures or traditional culture. In the case of a free-viewpoint TV, a user can freely manipulate the observed direction and viewpoint of media without one-sidedly accepting the media. Therefore, the free-viewpoint TV may change the media into active media. However, with the increase in the number of viewpoints, various problems occur in acquiring a video, storing and transmitting a video, and playing a video. In particular, when a video is stored and transmitted, a limited storage capacity and an increased channel band serve as the largest obstacles to the multiview video service.
Therefore, the multiview video application requires an encoding technique capable of satisfying high compression efficiency, interactivity with users, various scalabilities such as view scalability and temporal scalability, and random access in viewpoint and temporal directions. Such expectations and requirements are also reflected into standardization of a multiview video compression method of the MPEG-4 3DAV (3D Audio/Video) standardization group, which has started from 2001.